{"id":29819,"date":"2019-10-30T11:42:50","date_gmt":"2019-10-30T11:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=29819"},"modified":"2019-10-31T15:14:53","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T15:14:53","slug":"namibian-financial-holdings-company-improves-infrastructure-thanks-to-nutanix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2019\/10\/30\/namibian-financial-holdings-company-improves-infrastructure-thanks-to-nutanix\/","title":{"rendered":"Namibian financial holdings company improves infrastructure thanks to Nutanix"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Namibian financial holdings company that has seen its number of employees rise from 50 to 900 in a decade turned to Nutanix to improve its infrastructure model. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trustco Holdings is a dual listed diversified Namibian financial services group that invests and operates in sustainable high growth assets in emerging markets. Employing 900 people, the company operates from three business segments \u2013 insurance and investments; resources; and banking and finance. However, Christo Du Raan, COO IT Hardware and Infrastructure at Trustco, says that the company got to the point where the company needed to change its whole business model when it came to infrastructure, so started to look at what was available in the market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHyperconvergence was the new thing on the block and we\nfound that Nutanix seemed to be the most mature in that department,\u201d said Du\nRaan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe did a community edition testing first and it\u2019s been pretty much smooth all the way from inception to running our VMs and VDIs.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Du Raan said that Trustco do not follow the strict rules\nthat large corporates follow when it comes to its tender process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe like to do things quickly and fail quickly,\u201d said Du\nRaan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been with the company for 13 years and we look at what\nwe want and what there is in the market and say \u2018let\u2019s go for product a\u2019. We\nthen test it and if we don\u2019t like it, go for product b, c or d until we find\nthe one that works for us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is no tendering process because these are the things\nthat make us slow. We have a trial server just to test new technologies until\nwe say, \u2018right this fits the criteria and we want to stay with the system\u2019.\nMake no mistake, we\u2019ve implemented systems having spent a few million on it and\nquit it a week or two later, because that is what the company is. You win some,\nyou lose some.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Solution<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trustco\u2019s aim over the first two years was to get its\ninfrastructure consolidated and get the new Nutanix solutions in operation.\nThen earlier this year, the company explored the Nutanix software stack a\nlittle further and elected to license Prism Pro and implement Leap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re still in the baby stages, but\nwe\u2019ve seen with the Leap product that we can actually bring the stack closer to\none solution,\u201d said Du Raan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur next big planning would be to get Prism Pro up and\nrunning and get Leap for all our clusters, and then we\u2019ll take it from there<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe next step is to move away slowly and maturely from the\nremote desktop services into Nutanix Frame and push applications to the desktop.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAfrica is not there yet in terms of hybrid-cloud services,\nespecially in Namibia. The Internet is not reliable enough and our ISPs are not\nmature enough to handle cloud. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are a few players in the market that seem to be able\nto stretch from coast-to-coast, so we\u2019ll see where we\u2019re at in the future, but\nat the moment, I can\u2019t see heavy workloads going to the cloud, not in Namibia\nanyway.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benefits<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the beginning, there were still some parts of Nutanix\nthat the technical team didn\u2019t understand, and we tried to fix things by\nourselves,\u201d said Du Raan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe had to do some networking changes and had some big\nissues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut in my 24 years in IT, I have\nnever come across a company that has a support system like Nutanix, it\u2019s\nunheard of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI hate to call a customer care centre, because firstly\nwe\u2019re in Africa and the rest of them are in another time zone, so trying to\ncommunicate with them is a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd they also don\u2019t understand the way we work. We work\ndifferently than the Europeans and Americans because we are a \u2018jack of all\ntrades\u2019 \u2013 we know a little bit of this and a little bit of that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe quality of the support is a major reason why we\u2019ve stayed with Nutanix because I know if I log my call, two hours later, someone has helped me. Our workers benefit by the fact that the systems are always on. We had some shocking SLA delays with our legacy system with only 80% uptime and now we are very close to 99.9%, so from an internal and external customer perspective, they are very happy with Nutanix. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUptime has gone up dramatically and\nwe can provision services now. Technical staff feel more comfortable\nwith it because there\u2019s no other things that you need to know. I think it has\nmade us more agile and quicker and the product is a lot more resilient should\nwe have to go into maintenance mode.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital journey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Du Raan believes that Trustco\u2019s biggest digital journey will\nbe within its banking segment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur next digital projects will lie in banking and the Internet\nand software banking, doing some AI and Machine Learning data stuff in the\nbanking and financial industry,\u201d said Du Raan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTraditional industries, like insurance, will look into\nArtificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. As soon as you can start trading\nas a bank everything you do comes down to money and how you work with it, and these\ntype of analytics will give us insights into other businesses and how to\nimprove those businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Namibian financial holdings company that has seen its number of employees rise from 50 to 900 in a decade turned to Nutanix to improve its infrastructure model. Trustco Holdings is a dual listed diversified Namibian financial services group that invests and operates in sustainable high growth assets in emerging markets. Employing 900 people, the company […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":29820,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[565,34,338,46,399,19,9059,262],"tags":[496,11568,10243,48,11569,2370,392,1028,2028,11570,11313,4386,11567,10210],"class_list":["post-29819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking-finance","category-case-studies","category-case-study-newsletter","category-data-centres","category-more-news","category-regional-news","category-south-africa","category-used","tag-ai","tag-christo-du-raan","tag-hyperconvergence","tag-infrastructure","tag-leap","tag-legacy-systems","tag-machine-learning","tag-namibia","tag-nutanix","tag-nutanix-frame","tag-prism-pro","tag-sla","tag-trustco-holdings","tag-uptime"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29819"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29885,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29819\/revisions\/29885"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}